Review of The A-Team (2010) by Chads. — 18 Jun 2010

During a St. Louis fundraiser in 2004, New York Senator Hillary Clinton would prove that she lacked an important quality essential to being the lynchpin of a political A-team who could win her party's ticket at our most recent Democratic National Convention.

That quality was feet. If the former first lady had them, and the law-breaking physicality of an Adam Sandler in Dennis Dugan's "You Don't Mess with the Zohan", she would have most certainly been advised to insert either foot into her mouth, or better yet, attempted to knock herself out with Zohan-like malleability, prior to the current administration's secretary of state from inexplicably joking about Mahatma Gandhi's suppositional gas station in Missouri.

Too soon? Gandhi, so it happens, once again, turns up in the strangest places, turns up in "The A-Team", the most unlikely of contexts, when B.A. Barascus(Quinton "Rampage" Jackson), incarcerated for his mercenary ways, is found reading the peaceable teachings of India's preeminent political(and spiritual) figure from the last century, on a bus headed back to prison.

With an ongoing mission still in midstream, Hannibal(Liam Neeson) has little receptivity for pacifism, so he bamboozles B.A. by misconstruing Gandhi's non-violent rhetoric for the good of the unit, and by extension, the good of the country.

He makes Gandhi sound like Malcolm X, informing his fellow army ranger that the Indian leader "wasn't afraid to fight for something he believed in," inferring that Gandhi would resist dominion over his soul "by all means necessary," just like the black nationalist who was gunned down in 1965.

B.A. has a copy of "Tolerance and Compassion", not "The Autobiography of Malcolm X", which simultaneously avoids racial stereotyping, but works as a relevant metaphor in the sphere of contemporary politics.

Throughout Barack Obama's bid for the presidency, the right made a concerted effort to out the outgoing senator from Illinois as a Muslim, whose religion of Islam would seem the better fit for a soldier of fortune like B.

A., than Hinduism. When Barascus(a name that phonetically sounds similar to "Barack") takes the razor to his head, he, like Clinton, desecrates Gandhi's memory by choosing his old Mohawk(which denotes war) over his professed hero's inclination towards baldness.

The hairstyle, popularized by Washington Redskin fullback John Riggins and punk rockers, has its roots in the Mohawk Valley of, coincidentally, Upstate New York, which ties Barascus(a possible Obama double) to Clinton, creating an accidental pro-conservative subtext.